Janet Maslin

Swing Kids looks good and moves quickly at first; later on, mired in familiar-feeling moments, it flounders

The real flavor of Davis's account, and of the ferocity that earned Geronimo his place in history, is nowhere evident on screen.

Leviathan compares favorably with the other recent aquatic horror film Deepstar Six but probably not with anything else.

This is a bland, no-fault Frankenstein for the 90's, short on villainy but loaded with the tragically misunderstood.

What About Bob? does work as comedy for a while, thanks to the fortuitous teaming of Mr. Dreyfuss and Mr. Murray.

Beloved works on its own but is much enhanced by familiarity with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In so ambitiously bringing this story to the screen, Ms. Winfrey underscores a favorite, invaluable credo: read the book.

Rodman, awkward but definitely lively, is the occasion for har-har hair jokes ("Who does your hair, Siegfried or Roy?") and gives the film some much-needed comic relief. Rourke, as a villain named Stavros, is scary. And for once, he's supposed to be.

The Legend of Billie Jean' is competently made, sometimes attractively acted, and bankrupt beyond belief. It's hard to imagine that even the film makers, let alone audiences, can believe in a sweet, selfless heroine who just can't help becoming a superstar.

Crocodile Dundee II has been attractively photographed, if unremarkably directed, and it aims for affable, low-key escapism just as the first film did. But the earlier one had novelty to keep it going, and this time the novelty has begun to wear thin, even if Mr. Hogan remains generally irresistible.

True as it is, Reiner's film feels like the Hollywood version.

Stiffly playing a filmmaker with a growing passion for the tango, she makes this a handsome, drily meticulous film with no real fire anywhere beyond its supple dance scenes.

Rhinestone isn't unrelievedly terrible. It is helped by a director, Bob Clark, who treats the material good- humoredly and takes it lightly, as well as by a funny supporting cast.

Mr. Bronson grows ever more coolly dependable with each new film, but Love and Bullets is too clumsy to show him off to much advantage.

Just Cause has been directed so antiseptically that it lacks all sense of lifelike detail. Despite good looks and some ostentatious technical polish, it offers a textbook example of direction (by Arne Glimcher) that's utterly out of sync with its subject matter.

Tango and Cash is loaded with sweating, straining, smashing and grunting, with bulging-bicep shots and sadistic special effects. Watery electrocution sequences are a particular favorite, since these mean wet clothes, shooting sparks, writhing bodies and other current staples of high style. Images like these are so all-important in Tango and Cash that the idea of storytelling has virtually been annihilated.

With its long silences washed over by banal, overused music, The Indian in the Cupboard is best watched for its ingenious tricks of scale and for an invitingly peaceful look. [14 July 1995, p.C3]

Not even a film maker of Mr. Malle's intelligence and taste can make this stilted story add up. The only ingredient that can make sense of "Damage" is the obvious one: outright eroticism, of the sort that presumably got the film its original NC-17 rating.

These are performances that lost too much in the editing room, smothered by music and overshadowed by a picture-postcard vision of the American West.

Supergirl arouses some initial curiosity about the differences between the two cousins; for instance, that Supergirl can't change in phone booths and is much the better flier of the two. However the film, as directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by David Odell, quickly loses its novelty.

For all its studied sultriness, the movie feels unsexy, perhaps because its inspiration is the kind of hard- hearted western that concentrates on manly combat while eschewing all sentiment.

A potentially strong cast makes its way in deadly earnest through material that's often better suited to a Monty Python skit.

Poltergeist III suffers from bad casting and from the actors' having been encouraged to behave as if sampling an exciting new toothpaste; everyone smiles unreasonably, except when screaming.

If the Turtles insist on remaining a mainstream box-office attraction, at least they've now had the decency to make a mainstream movie.

Likable for its outlandishness, less so when it shows a self-important streak.

The funniest parts of this uneven, ostentatiously upscale comedy are those that find Mr. Murphy's Marcus adopting the behavior of a sexually insecure woman.

The material itself, thoroughly unsurprising on the stage, is if anything even more so on the screen.

But this knotty investigative thriller has trouble achieving the rock-solid credibility to hold an audience in thrall.

Jack Frost is so sugarcoated that it makes other recent efforts in this genre look blisteringly honest. On the other hand, it's just cheerful and bogus enough to keep children reasonably entertained.

The latest and most uncertain of Disney's animated efforts, with its manic mood swings and cloying, none-too-cuddly hero.

In Who's Harry Crumb? Mr. Candy has a varied role, a good supporting cast, a script full of comic setups and every imaginable opportunity to shine. But the result is little more than a weak comedy, one that suggests Mr. Candy is potentially a great deal better than his material.

Teachers is Arthur Hiller's attempt to do for public education what he did for medicine in The Hospital, and the results are very uneven.

Mr. Mom would be funny if it had jokes. That's not so self-evident as it sounds, because it's not a claim that every failed comedy can make. The actors here, Mr. Keaton and Teri Garr, are likable and bright, and the situation has possibilities. Very little is made of them, except for such predictable developments as Jack's going to the supermarket with the kids in tow, and knocking over soup cans and fruit.

Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles was directed by Steve Barron, who has a number of music videos to his credit, and shows off the skills of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, without which there would have been no film at all.

Mr. Seagal's own film is awesomely incoherent, a mixture of poorly executed violence and Dances With Wolves-style astral musings.

This bizarre, special effects-filled movie doesn't have the jaunty hop-and-zap spirit of the Nintendo video game from which it takes -- ahem -- its inspiration. What it has instead are a weird, jokey science-fiction story, "Batman"-caliber violence and enough computer-generated dinosaurs to get the jump on "Jurassic Park."

It's cute and jokey and has no particular edge.

Having introduced the two principals and had some fun with their antagonism, the film has nowhere to go.

Mr. Shyer has no idea how to frame this material, let alone make it funny. Most of Irreconcilable Differences is terribly flat; the camerawork is dim and unflattering, the sets are bare even when they're supposed to look lived in and some of the dialogue is simply beyond the actors.

It winds up illustrating the very emptiness it mocks.

Jagged Edge has harsh lighting, blunt performances, and artless, no-nonsense dialogue relieved by the occasional bit of excess color.

Romantic comedies, of which Chances Are is nominally one, are better off making their characters appear glamorous and attractive than making them look like ineffectual, long-suffering nincompoops, which is the case here.

But even after the documentary affectation gives way to a more conventional narrative, the film has trouble ringing true.

The fact that Cannonball Run II isn't much good may not prevent it from becoming this summer's best- loved lowest-common-denominator comedy, if only because of the utter absence of any competition.

Written mostly as ensemble comedy, Striptease grinds to a halt whenever the star goes through her dance paces, most of which prove awkwardly strenuous and are daring only by the standards of A-list movie stars.

The movie often seems even more uneventful than material like this need make it, and Mr. Milius's attention to his actors focuses more closely on their pectorals than on their performances.

The film never gets past the unlikelihood that its characters have much chance of living happily ever after. Or of finding real heat or humor along the way.

Low humor might count for more here if it weren't constantly overshadowed by the film's maudlin streak.

Cocoon: The Return is so tired, in fact, that it can barely recapitulate the winning formula of the original hit.

More American Graffiti is grotesquely misconceived, so much so that it nearly eradicates fond memories of the original.

Deep Cover eventually degenerates into so much gratuitous violence that "kill" sounds like the most-used verb in the screenplay's last stages. The screenplay's frequent emphasis on homophobic insults is another unfortunate touch.

In any case, Love and a .45 is too mean-spirited to be funny, and it winds up nastily derivative rather than clever.

The film borrows themes and cast members from HBO's "Sopranos," but the script lacks the nuance and wit of that series's creator, David Chase.

False and condescending films in this genre are nothing new, but Dangerous Minds steamrollers its way over some real talent.

Trouble is, while not trading quips, the characters actually go through the motions of being scared of the croc, menaced by the croc and so on. And since even the gator horror satire is old hat (remember ''Alligator?''), there's no remaining way to make this interesting.

The movie manages to be painless and pointless in equal measure.

Would-be Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse games...are more memorable for their settings...than for their sense.

Mr. Zeffirelli and his screenwriter, Judith Rascoe, have bitten off so much more than they can chew that their film is virtually unintelligible at times. A great deal happens in the novel, much more than this two-hour movie can contain. But it tries to touch so many bases that its transitions are jolting, its scenes often undeveloped, and the motives of its characters frequently unclear.

FOR all their extravagance, Ken Russell's films have never lacked exuberance or humor, which makes the flat, joyless tone of Crimes of Passion a surprise. Much of this is attributable to a screenplay by Barry Sandler filled with smutty double-entendres and weighty ironies. Only intermittently does Mr. Russell break through with the kind of manic flamboyance that is so singularly and rudely his own.

A grim, sour Jim Carrey comedy that erases the boundary between anarchic humor and sociopathic malice.

Bagdad Cafe is too slow-paced to work as a comedy, and its screenplay manages simultaneously to be both shapeless and pat.

Derivative as it was, ''Romancing the Stone'' did have a certain spunk, thanks to its contrast between the workaday life of Joan Wilder, romance novelist (played so gamely by Kathleen Turner), and the far-flung adventures into which the screenplay propelled her. Sadly for the sequel, the novelty in that contrast was more than used up the first time around. This time, through no fault of his own, the director Lewis Teague (the first film was directed by Robert Zemeckis) has little more to do than construct a retread.

The screenplay, by Harold Nebenzal, leaves one end of this story conspicuously untied, but it does its best to titillate the audience with a mixture of teen-age porn and trademark Bronson spitefulness.

The main trouble is that The Little Rascals is caught in a time warp, lost between the ingenuous ragamuffins of the early talkies and the more willfully streetwise children of today. So even working the title into the screenplay becomes a strain.

In Hollywood Buddha, Mr. Caland plays, directs and reimagines himself. This is truly a vanity project, as evidenced by the ample amount of screen time he gives his own pecs and thighs.

Garret is played by Kevin Costner, who should avoid all future roles that call for overalls and goggles and who this time crosses the line from teasingly laconic to stodgy.

There are parts of The Blues Brothers that would have played infinitely better with a knock-about feeling, a sloppiness like that of "Animal House." As it is, the movie is airless. The stakes needn't have been so suffocatingly high.

As it is, the suspense is sludgy and the character development nil; even the inadvertent comedy is spotty.

there is so little genuine wit to be found in ''Clue.'' The film does have a speedy pace, but that could hardly be confused with Mr. Hawks's madcap humor; instead, it involves a lot of running around through secret passages, and some slapstick routines involving dead bodies. The actors are meant to function as an ensemble, but that merely means that they often repeat the same line simultaneously.

Like The Wiz...Xanadu is desperately stylish without having any real style.

In Year of the Dragon, a busy and elaborate film that manages to be inordinately messy, his tactics are a constant distraction, dissipating the viewer's interest at every turn.

Boiling Point is a barely tepid police story co-starring Wesley Snipes and Dennis Hopper, cast respectively as a hard-boiled detective and a wily con man. Since the material (written and directed by James B. Harris, from a novel by Gerald Petievich) offers not one shred of surprise, it's understandable that neither actor seems to believe anything he has to say.

Unfortunately, the skimpy screenplay by Ralph Farquhar insists upon entangling the performers in the most conventional subplots imaginable. Talent contests, feeble attempts at romance and the travails of a struggling young record company are all enlisted, however briefly, in the effort to drum up backstage activities for the players, who are best watched in performance anyhow. Rap music is infinitely more original than these creaky devices, and it deserves something better.

Loud, frantic, ridiculously overproduced and featuring a preening performance by Val Kilmer as a supposedly brilliant master of disguise, The Saint is sheer overkill.

This glib, overheated film about vicious primates delivers little suspense, nor are there signs of the 65 cited volumes and articles that turned Mr. Crichton's book into such a learning experience.

The cast of Once Upon a Crime performs energetically, as if the material was funny, although most of the time it is not. As a general rule, films whose plots revolve around lost dogs are apt to be short on comic inspiration, and this one is no exception.

Most of Weird Science, for all its repetitive vulgarity and its wide array of gimmicks, is essentially much too calculating and cautious. Even 14-year-old boys may find it heavy sledding.

It's a flimsy sentimental comedy with more product plugs and fewer laughs than might have been hoped for.

The comforting sameness of all the ''Rockys'' and the overbearing star quality of Mr. Stallone in his lovable-lug incarnation may well make Rocky IV another hit. But when it flashes back to its antecedents, particularly to the original ''Rocky'' with its bashful heroine and self-effacing star, it becomes clear how bloated and hollow the story has become.

Dutch is never more than glancingly comic, and rarely even that.

Gentle and moving as it means to be, Always is overloaded. There is barely a scene here that wouldn't have worked better with less fanfare.

No film winds up with a name like Feeling Minnesota if it has anything definite in mind.

This film is quite literally lost in the wilderness, with an intermittent, picturesque prettiness that doesn't suit the action at all. More damagingly, Mr. Dickerson does nothing to keep his cast from chewing up the mountain scenery. [16 Apr 1994, p.11]

Schumacher almost invariably breathes more life into his material than he has here. It's a lot easier to tick off the forced, farfetched touches in Eight Millimeter than to count the ones that ring true.

It isn't nearly as successful a showcase for this filmmaker's extraordinary talents.

Directed by Dwight Little of "Free Willy 2," and written by onetime high school classmates, Wayne Beach and David Hodgin (Mr. Hodgin died in 1995), Murder at 1600 eagerly invokes other films and stock images without showing much style of its own.

High Heels has no real mirth and not even enough energy to keep it lively.

Obtuse, prettily decorative comedy. Characters burst gaily into song when, as often happens, they don't have anything better to do.

As lavishly escapist as they are, the latest James Bond films have become strenuous to watch, now that the business of maintaining Bond's casual savoir-faire looks like such a monumental chore.

A movie that's barely there. The McKenzies are genial enough, and once in a while they're vaguely funny. But their film is so ephemeral that you may hardly be aware of watching it, even while it's going on.

An astonishingly lazy and perfunctory effort that does little to realize his (Carrey) comic potential.

A broad, low comedy full of speech defects and pratfalls.

A whopping wrong turn throws this lightweight, benign-looking movie terminally off course.

The latest Irwin Allen disaster movie is When Time Ran Out, which is waxen even by Mr. Allen's standards.

The movie may have been conceived in a spirit of merriment, but watching it feels like playing shuffleboard at the absolute insistence of a bossy shipboard social director. When whimsy gets to be this overbearing, it simply isn't whimsy any more.

With a score by Giorgio Moroder, and with ingenious costumes that are utterly au courant, Flashdance contains such dynamic dance scenes that it's a pity there's a story here to bog them down.

A confused horror film custom-designed for those who prefer their scares set in a clean, comfortable, architecturally correct atmosphere, rather than the usual Gothic settings.

It's too bad that Mr. Wrye's bungling renders the story sob-proof, because injured-athlete sagas are usually so hard to resist.

St. Elmo's Fire is most appealing when it simply gives the actors a chance to flirt with the camera, and with one another. When it attempts to take seriously the problems of characters who are spoiled, affluent and unbearably smug, it becomes considerably less attractive.

Pared down to a farfetched plot and paper-thin motives, the story relies on an overload of tangential subplots to keep it looking busy. [3 Apr 1996, p.C15]

The series now lacks all of its original stars and much of its earlier determination. It has morphed into something less innocent and more derivative than it used to be, something the noncultist is ever less likely to enjoy.

The pace is so plodding and the dialogue so unwaveringly banal … that the film can't rise to the extraordinary sensations it means to capture.

Lifeforce shows off Mr. Hooper's way with a whirling mass of protoplasm, just as Poltergeist did. But its style is shrill and fragmented enough to turn Lifeforce into hysterical vampire porn.

Deep inside the vague, unfocused excesses of The Bodyguard, the tale of a buttoned-down security agent hired to protect a glamorous pop star, there lurks the potential for a compelling film noir.

Humorous slashings and car accidents constitute similar high points in a film that is glaringly short on ''Scream''-style self-mockery to match its dopey mayhem.

The enthusiastically nutty Color of Night has the single-mindedness of a bad dream, and about as much reliance on everyday logic.

The film's many voids are not meaningfully filled by all the monsters and assembly-line workers that crop up.

The slackest and most harebrained of Mr. Eastwood's recent movies. It is overlong and virtually uneventful, even though there are half a dozen cute characters and woolly subplots competing for the viewer's attentions.

The characters and their jargon are occasionally amusing, but there's no action, no conflict, no overwhelming satire and nothing to jolt them out of their lethargy.

The third in a 3-D series, as in Jaws 3-D or now Amityville 3-D, simply isn't a good idea. Once the first two films in a series have exhausted most opportunities for action, the third is liable to average half a dozen exposition scenes for every eventful episode. And 3-D exposition is the stuff of which headaches are made.

Innocent Blood, which could easily have been titled "A French Vampire in Pittsburgh" in homage to one of Mr. Landis's earlier triumphs, is even more dependent on gruesome special effects than "An American Werewolf in London" was, and is a lot less imaginative.

It succeeds as a reasonably smart no-brainer. If you've ever had a yen to relive the third grade, this must be the next best thing.

The territory where the circus sideshow meets the avant-garde...visually arresting, dramatically blurry.

Medicine Man transports a lot of Hollywood-style hot air to the remote jungle outpost where Dr. Campbell has accidentally stumbled upon a cancer-reversing formula.

Oh Heavenly Dog is diverting enough for its dog tricks - I like dog tricks, don't get me wrong - but it otherwise shows few signs of life, and many signs of depressing modernism.

Abel Ferrera...has a tin ear for dialogue and an evident penchant for ludicrous material. But beyond that, he is clearly a talented fellow. One can only hope he finds something else to make movies about very soon.

Based on a novel by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Julia manages to draw on every horror movie cliche imaginable and still make very little sense.

I was able to sit through only the first fifteen minutes of Dawn of the Dead.

Ought to please an undemanding kiddie audience, but Flipper offers little else in the way of excitement or plot.

Conceived frankly as a product, complete with hit-to-be theme song over the closing credits, this adventure film cares less about storytelling than about keeping the Musketeers' feathered hats on straight whenever they go galloping.

Porky's Revenge proceeds with the kind of comic pacing that has the audience laughing way ahead of each joke. Some of it is funny, but it's also entirely predictable.

A movie with a sloppily sentimental heart that's as big as the city in which its story takes place.

Fatigue is in the air. This third look at the quintessentially middle-American Griswold family, led by Clark (Mr. Chase) and the very patient Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo) is only a weary shadow of the original ''National Lampoon's Vacation,'' which found a lot to laugh at as it followed the dopey paterfamilias Clark and his quarrelsome brood on a hellish cross-country journey in their station wagon. The new film does little more than reintroduce these familiar characters (with new actors playing the children, who would otherwise be college age by now) and let them get on one another's nerves in earnest.

Since Trapped in Paradise assembles three actors as amusing as Nicolas Cage, Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, it's a minor holiday miracle that this homey comedy barely elicits even a chuckle.

Operation Dumbo Drop is painlessly good-humored by any lights, but the viewers most likely to enjoy all this are those most easily driven to giggles by the idea of elephant poop.

It will seem suspenseful only to those who wonder whether Mr. Stallone can get the dog out alive.

Nothing spoils a horror story faster than a stupid victim. And Nightmares, an anthology of four supposedly scary episodes, has plenty of those.

Too often, Betty Blue has the posturing good looks of a fashion spread and nothing more.

The Loveless, a pathetic homage to the 1950's, has been made by two writer-directors, Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery, who share an unmistakable longing for that era. But their nostalgia expresses itself no more interestingly than through a lot of silly, lifeless posturing, plus the use of colors like chartreuse.

Dialogue that strains to be colorful, indiscriminately piled-on pop songs, plot developments that aren't followed through on, and minor aspects of motivation that are never known.

The idea has anarchic possibilities, but the film itself is awfully tame.

Elaborate as this sounds, there really isn't much plot here, only a parade of arbitrary visual tricks to hold the film together.

Slow, overlong and ridiculously overproduced.

Isn't much when it comes to either deliberate or inadvertent humor. But it does have a few amusing moments.

Frankly geriatric, and made without a single gunfight or explosion, the weak but genial romp Out to Sea supplies touristy scenery, familiar players and enough rumba scenes for 10 weddings. Everything about the film is as intentionally dated as its gag about Normandy.

Mr. Ichaso's slow, deliberate direction of Barry Michael Cooper's windy screenplay is painfully slack. If this film doesn't resort to much vicious gunplay until its later sections, that may be because the characters are always in danger of talking one another to death.

Here, instead, is Keanu Reeves in one of his off roles, sleepwalking dutifully but seeming to share the audience's bewilderment over how he wound up in this awkward, slow-moving story.

While not exactly an actress picture, The Final Chapter takes pains to make its characters a little more personable than the horror- movie norm. This is unfortunate, since there is nothing to do during the second half of the film but watch them die.

A film bursting with enthusiasm for a fresh, appealing fantasy has been replaced by one most eager to maintain the status quo.

As directed by John Carpenter, Memoirs of an Invisible Man does much more with special effects than it does with character, and even the visual tricks begin to seem commonplace when they've been repeated too often. [28 Feb 1992, p.C17]

Unfortunately, the mad romanticism of Rimbaud's exploits has been made to look preposterous here, despite a cast that should have been magnetic in its own right. Total Eclipse clumsily exaggerates both these characters, from the moment when Rimbaud begins savoring experience in a laughably over-the-top poetic manner.

Newly benign and noticeably clumsier than the hits (Williamson) has written.

Jetsons: The Movie will appeal only to small children, and only to the most patient among them.

References to Harry Truman and the Roaring Twenties are perhaps meant to appeal to an older audience, as is Red Buttons as Jack's friend, but ''18 Again'' isn't successfully aimed at anyone in particular.

Kalifornia, which was written by Tim Metcalfe, lets its stars overact to the rafters as it vacillates between wild pretentiousness and occasional high style.

A weird blooper reel, shown as the credits roll, records how often the actors broke into nervous laughter, and this goofy coda undermines any serious intent or honest emotion in the previous, tedious 80 minutes.

Mr. Garity's performance doesn't quite redeem this sorely lacking production.

The central portion of Corvette Summmer, set in Las Vegas with an Alice in Wonderland air, has a visual zaniness that meshes effectively with the script. But for the most part, the movie takes a slender, boyish conceit — of the sort that is suddenly so popular among Hollywood's current batch of boy wonders — and invests it with silliness rather than whimsy.

Katherine Heigl, playing the teen-age daughter who is mistaken for Mr. Depardieu's girlfriend, parades about in skimpy bathing suits, displaying almost everything but a sense of humor.

Pretty actors, grisly critters, brains sucked out of skulls, buckets of green slime and a plot that is half beach blanket bingo, half Iwo Jima.

The characters' sexual abandon is so complete that it robs the story of any shape.

But the film, written by Phoef Sutton and Lisa-Maria Radano and directed by Richard Benjamin in a style cute enough to peel paint off the walls, can't do much to generate romantic sparks between its two young leads.

Tom Hanks is utterly out of place in the Israeli romance Every Time We Say Goodbye...for at least two reasons: because there's something so innately comic about him, even in solemn surroundings, and because he has so much more energy than the film does.

The Accidental Tourist often relies on Miss Tyler's methods without tempering them, and gives a tone of crashing obviousness to material that need not have seemed that way. [23 Dec 1988, p.C12]

The storytelling of Disclosure is too forced and polemical to be on a par with better Crichton tales like "Jurassic Park." This time, it's the author who's the dinosaur.

French Kiss may have a more putatively foolproof formula, but everyone here has done vastly more interesting work. Too much gets lost in translation.

Aeronautically and otherwise, it's a bumpy trip.

The episodes are marginally interesting, but each is a little too long. And each could be fully explained in a one-sentence synopsis.

King Kong Lives, which was directed by John Guillerman, has a dull cast and a plot that's even duller, but the ape himself is in good form.

Like "The Quick and the Dead," Desperado wavers uneasily between myth making and parody, so that too many scenes drag on long after they've lost their punch.

The best things about the movie are probably its amusingly modish outfits and hairdos, which demand that the audience keep its eyes open, and the music, which doesn't.

When the film announces, halfway through, that it will be devoting the rest of its running time to tying up these loose ends, the audience may as well give up the ghost.

The Police Academy series seems to shoot for an ever younger crowd. The optimum viewer for Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol would be a 10-year-old boy. Even better, it would be a whole pack of them. That's not to say the film isn't funny; it means only that the sense of humor being addressed is very specific. Stay away if drawing room farce is what you're after.

The Burning makes a few minor departures from the usual cliches of its genre, though it carefully preserves the violence and sadism that are schlock horror's sine qua non.

Dragonheart joins Mission: Impossible in wasting the talents of charismatic European actors, and in cobbling together exciting-looking ads that are much better than the finished film.

An uneasy amalgam of inconsistent attitudes, without enough humor or zaniness to divert attention from its questionable premise.

Though this is by no means the grisliest or most witless film made from one of Mr. King's horrific fantasies, it can lay claim to being the most unpleasant. Why? Because when you strip away the suspenseful buildup to a King story, you're often left with mechanical moralizing and crude, sophomoric small talk. Needful Things has more of both than any film could ever need.

Made with great effort and no charm, this mirthless fantasy film returns its young hero, Bastian Balthazar Bux (Jonathan Brandis), to the land of Fantasia, which when first glimpsed here appears to be made entirely of cellophane.

In the cast are many, many dogs, who are charmed by Damien in a way no audience is likely to be.

Through all this, Mr. Reynolds displays little understanding of the very good reasons why audiences usually like him. He is at his most ponderous here, with none of his trademark resiliency or sardonic humor.

Though it has a potentially funny cast, this sprawling comedy has been made in a near-total wit vacuum.

More than enough sadism to go around. But the net effect is less excitement than overkill. The screenplay, by Larry Brothers, has a tendency to forget old plot elements as it picks up new ones.

Mr. Needham's secret weapon is Mr. Reynolds, and Mr. Reynolds isn't here. Without his overriding friendliness and humor on hand, there is too much opportunity to notice the weak spots in Mr. Needham's direction.

Mr. Brando's performance will be deemed interestingly audacious only by those who found "Apocalypse Now" too sane.

Mr. Allen, who directed Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and produced it too, is so obviously ill-equipped to stage action scenes in cramped quarters that his audience winds up wishing as fervently as his characters for a chance to see the light of day.

The Secret of the Sword is a Saturday morning kiddie cartoon stretched out to feature length, which by some lights is an awfully long time.

The film's frequently dark, grimy look and such digressions as a demonstration of how to eat river rat will appeal chiefly to those who like their science fiction on the squalid side.

The film jabs so relentlessly at the viscera that the audience is never allowed to notice anything independently; if Mr. Joanou wants you to spot a license plate, for instance, he drives the car right into a floor-level camera.

The mirthless follow-up to a film that wasn't all that funny in the first place. [03 Oct 1980, p.8]

Video-addicted kids may well find this exciting, but for anyone old enough to stay out later than 9 P.M. it's a distinct bore.

The fact that Miss Brown and Miss Jones have obviously tried to inject a little satire and innovation into the genre just makes the ultimate vulgarity of their film all the more disappointing.

Existential terror, in the case of Robert Harmon's Hitcher, means an unmotivated viciousness that's as cryptic at the story's end as it was at the beginning.

The dramatic possibilities of the material are weak at best, and its satirical underpinnings are nowhere to be found. As for the characters, they are either deeply unsympathetic or, when they resort to technical jargon for very long periods of time, incomprehensible.

The film's bright look and visual energy are much more liberating than the machinations of its teen queens.

The director, B. W. L. Norton, and the writers, Richard Martini, Tim Metcalfe and Miguel Tejada-Flores, display no idea whatsoever of how to keep a film moving or how to hold an audience's interest. Listlessness and sloppiness on this scale are truly depressing.

It doesn't help that the mystery plot seems half-baked in the end, or that none of the actors appear entirely comfortable with their roles. Miss Ryan looks edgy and spends a lot of time tossing her hair. Mr. Harmon is easygoing and attractive, but his nice-guy manner belies his character's steely talk.

Troll has a knowing tone that's more smart-alecky than clever. And it hovers uncomfortably between comedy and horror, without ever landing decisively in either camp. The film is as funny as it gets in a sequence that has Sonny Bono pretending to be a great ladies' man.

103 minutes is an awfully long time to watch people whiz along the boardwalk. The novelty wears off in a hurry.

Mr. Douglas does a lot of stunts, some of them reasonably good; these seem to be the would-be comic backbone of a movie that's not after laughs but heehaws, which in any case it doesn't get.

The plot of Michael Grais's and Mark Victor's screenplay is even more nonsensical than it needs to be. [11 Jul 1992]

It means to be funny, with a cast including several talented young comedians (among them Bill Maher, as a record business exectuvie), but it's not.

Two ridiculous blood-soaked hours.

It's mostly just slight, and none of it elicits more than the mildest of chuckles.

The essentially two-character play has been opened up to the point that it includes a variety of settings and subordinate figures, but it never approaches anything lifelike.

The screenplay, by Steven E. de Souza (whose credits include the Die Hard movies), contains many glib, obscene wisecracks, plus the misinformation that Anna Karenina was Tolstoy's first book.

Just a parade of scattershot gags, more often weird than funny an dmost often just flat.

There are seeds of something funny in the film's beginning and in its premise, but they are soon dissipated by so little sustained wit, and so much scenery.

A costly, awful-looking science-fiction epic with one of the weirdest story lines ever to hit the screen.

Although Michael Dinner's direction is noticeably better than the material, the film aims consistently for the lowest common denominator.

Each beer-guzzling marathon inevitably leads to one of those bathroom scenes that provide the film with just about its only jokes.

The story it tells, of 19th-century ghosts and scoundrels in Byelorussia, is potentially of some interest. But the tale is presented in a drab and confusing fashion by film makers with only the faintest command of their craft.

Alternately grisly and dull, with few surprises.

Cutthroat Island proves too stupidly smutty for children, too cartoonish for sane adults and not racy enough for anyone who regards Ms. Davis in a tight-laced bodice as its main attraction. The only serious incentive for seeing this spectacle is a fascination with extravagance, since Cutthroat Island is indeed scenic, hectic and big.

The film does nothing to accommodate Mr. Pryor's singular comic talents...It keeps the crazy premise but does away with such essential ingredients as funny material and antic timing.

The Pirate Movie stars Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins in a cut-rate kiddie version of Gilbert and Sullivan, laced with synthetic pop ballads and leavened with infantile dirty jokes.

Not even bags of body parts, a bitten-off tongue or a man forced to cut off a pound of his own flesh keep it from being dull.

Nobody could shine in the listless atmosphere created by Phillip Noyce's perfunctory direction. And nobody could do much with a line like "Zeke, I want to have a real relationship." Or "Listen, do you work out?"

Instead, Mr. Carrey turns up in a sloppy second Ace Ventura film that's little more than an echo of the first. A two-minute trailer wouldn't miss many of its highlights.

One of the many problems with Gus Van Sant's tortured, worked-over Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is that Sissy Hankshaw talks like a novel, and a dated one at that.

This time Mr. Altman, such a stunningly intuitive portraitist when he truly plumbs the mysteries that guide his characters, works without inventiveness and with glaring nonchalance.

Miss Rivers's jokes mostly have to do with racial stereotypes and the essential revoltingness of pregnancy, but a few of them are funny just the same. However, as a director, Miss Rivers is forever sandbagging her own scenes, throwing away a good chuckle in a sequence that desperately needs a punch line, or wasting something fairly subtle right after a broad, dopey joke about a urine sample.

Never succeeds in becoming either torrid or scary. It does generate a few chuckles in its depiction of what are supposedly the workings of a chic and hard-hitting magazine...The Crush is for the most part grindingly predictable and mechanically played.

The movie is so sour that its humor is often undermined, because so many of the jokes are either mean-spirited or scatological, or both. Women are either explicitly predatory or stupidly decorative, and homosexuals are made fun of regularly. Bathroom jokes are everywhere. Flamboyantly bad taste, which Mr. Brooks raised to the level of supreme wit in his ''Springtime for Hitler'' number in ''The Producers,'' is this time just bad.

It's a shock to find Neil Simon's name attached to something as resoundingly unfunny as The Slugger's Wife.

P.C.U. turns out to be a surprisingly lame and unfocused campus comedy, one that pays remarkably little attention to its own comic possibilities.

Guardian angel movies almost always have a little charm, but The Heavenly Kid has none.

There is an essential meanness to the entire project, tapping the manipulative power of taunts. Such jokes don't jibe with the times, the culture.

Really, it's all as funny as a hernia.

Van Damme, who has nonetheless made eight films in six years, including "Bloodsport," "Cyborg" and "Kickboxer." His looks are memorable but his acting skills stunningly limited, confined mostly to the flexing, seething and pouting realm. Should anyone be in the market for an all-new Hercules, Mr. Van Damme might at the very least take a number. But when it comes to even the minimally dramatic events of Lionheart, he's in over his head.

For every necessary touch that Valmont has reduced or dispensed with (the climactic duel scene, for instance), there is another, less vital moment that has been expanded.

In place of a real story, there is just the spectacle of stock characters being put through their paces to fill up the time.

The film's facile treatment of racial issues may be enough to bring back the practice of throwing tomatoes at the screen.

As martial-arts movies go, it's pretty tame. As movies of any other sort go, tame is putting it nicely.

SEVERAL of the characters in Dune are psychic, which puts them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in the movie.

Early in his career, at the time of ''Diner,'' Mr. Rourke managed to do this sort of thing very seductively, with a charming nonchalance. This time he seems puffy, sleazy and sadly ineffectual, well over the edge into self-parody.

It takes on the overtones not of an awful movie, but of an awful play.

Lacks the sexy elan of "La Femme Nikita" and suffers from infinitely worse culture shock. [18 Nov 1994, p.C18]

Despite Mr. Brosnan's best efforts to be lethally debonair, the Bond franchise has sacrificed most of what made this character unique in the first place, turning the world's suavest spy into one more pitchman and fashion plate. This latest film is such a generic action event that it could be any old summer blockbuster, except that its hero is chronically overdressed.

This film lacks even the inadvertently buoyant awfulness that makes some bad movies fun. It's just plain dull.

The film is a labor of love for Casper Andreas, who wrote, directed and starred in this first feature. For the actors he has chosen, it's a labor of lust, with copious necking and grappling required. For the audience, it's just a labor.

Mr. Carpenter has directed the film with B-movie bluntness, but with none of the requisite snap. And his screenplay (written under the pseudonym Frank Armitage) makes the principals sound even more tongue-tied than they have to. [4 Nov 1988, p.C8]

Less a sequel than a retread...Dizzy and slight, with an even more negligible plot than its predecessor had. This time the story can't even masquerade as an excuse for stringing the songs together.

Though the combination of Linda Fiorentino, Chazz Palminteri and David Caruso promised Jade some fire, it winds up with no more spark than a doused campfire.

Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon is a multimedia movie of sorts, designed for those who can't bear the monotony of only one thought or sound or activity at a time.

The film's only bright idea is a duo named Chain Saw (Cameron) and Dave (Riley), who love horror films and instigate grisly but imaginative practical jokes, like pretending to be attacked by bunnies when the class makes a field trip to a petting zoo.

This movie has nothing but foolishness to carry it along. At least it is foolishness that pretends, however unsuccessfully, to be grand. [19 Dec 1980, p.C18]

There was more Allenesque potential in (Schaeffer's) earlier ``My Life's in Turnaround'' (directed with Donal Lardner Ward) than there is in this painfully cute concoction, which is about two old friends with a pact to leap off the Brooklyn Bridge. There are too many occasions when the viewer may wish they would just go ahead and jump.

Even the fish lack personality in Deepstar Six, a film that makes the exotic undersea world not much more interesting than the average bedroom closet.

Movies like Private School usually make money, no matter how sleazy or derivative they happen to be.

As directed by Barry Levinson and acted by an incredible collection of male stars, Sleepers settles the authenticity question by allowing not a whiff of real life into its universe.

The film's sole ray of sunshine is Fred Ward, who reveals an unexpected flair for comedy in the role of Deborah Ann's father, a police detective with a very hot temper and a vein in his forehead that visibly throbs.

Newsies is a long, halfhearted romp through what is made to seem a not terribly compelling chapter in New York City's history.

Mr. Allen might just as well have devoted his talents to man-eating goldfish, poodles on the rampage or carniverous canaries.

So many horror-movie clichés have been assembled under the roof of a single haunted house that the effect is sometimes mind-bogglingly messy. There is apparently very little to which the director, Stuart Rosenberg, will not resort. Scary things do happen in the movie, but they're always telegraphed in advance and make too little sense to have a cumulative effect.

How bad could it be? Not exactly awful. But not funny, sexy or romantic either, which doesn't leave anything for this inert and oddly confused movie to do.

Twins turns out to be, among other things, sad evidence that witty direction is becoming a dying art.

The cast never has much chance to shine. And the main attraction is kept all too understandably under wraps.

An interminable car chase punctuated by dumb stunts and even dumber dialogue, plus the well-worth-missing sight of Paul Williams in a dress.

Surf Nazis Must Die isn't funny in the slightest, the title notwithstanding. It's a standard, thoroughly stupid gang-war exploitation film intercut with occasional low-energy surfing footage, featuring characters named Adolf, Eva and so on who chant slogans, wear swastikas on their wetsuits and burn surfboards from time to time. Not even the actors' relatives will find this interesting.

Though the film never becomes actively unfunny, neither does it do much more than tread water. The raccoons have a better time than the audience will.

Mr. Fleischer brings absolutely no playfulness to what might, at least, have been enjoyably light. And he brings out the worst in a cast that was ill-chosen to begin with. The most memorable thing about the film is the costume/production design by Danilo Donati, which is genuinely demented. Even the horses wear too much junk jewelry.

Apparently too much eye of newt got into the formula for Hocus Pocus, transforming a potentially wicked Bette Midler vehicle into an unholy mess. That's too bad, since Ms. Midler's appearance in a role like the one she has here could have been pure witchcraft.

This one is clumsy, mean spirited and amazingly unmusical.

The heads may be dead, but at least they have a comical look.

It must be said that Berkowitz's shamelessness and persistence aren't inevitably irresistible.

The only real value of Damnation Alley is educational: This is the movie to see if you don't understand what was so wonderful about the special effects in, say, Star Wars.

This claustrophobic mess of a movie offers only carnage.

Mr. Lundgren, who glowers his way all too convincingly through the role of a rabid bully, may well be the only man in the universe who can make Mr. Van Damme look like an actor.

The plot sounds like that of a straight porn film, which is what Bolero would have become with anyone other than John Derek directing. Mr. Derek, who also wrote the screenplay, shows off his wife in an oddly self-contradictory way. He's glad to flaunt her tanned torso and her radiant smile, which is fortunate, since these are the movie's only assets.

An especially weak teen- age comedy even by today's none-too- high standards. Everything about it is either second best or second hand.

The two-minute trailer for Black Sheep is so crammed with pratfalls that it appears funny. But a full hour and a half leaves this comedy looking one-note and virtually laugh-free...This may sound like a John Belushi role, but Mr. Farley has little of Mr. Belushi's gift for sneaky, subversive mischief. He spends his time here just getting his thumbs caught in a car's hood, being dragged on his stomach until sparks fly, etc. Almost all the film's jokes involve physical pain.

Wide-eyed and mirthlessly peppy, Mr. Arnold soon wears out his welcome as a bumbling would-be bank robber who commandeers a group of young hostages.

Renny Harlin, who did a much better job directing ''Die Hard 2,'' displays no sense of humor and takes the film's nonsensical action scenes much too seriously, at one point even blowing up a beach house in the process.

Dumb, vulgar and mostly humorless.